Sky-Watcher Allview tripod for panoramas and time lapse pans

I was looking at a review of this powered telescope tripod/head in a telescope magazine which mentioned that it would be very useful for still photographers who shoot panoramas or time lapse pans. It can be programed to do a series of repos plus triggering the camera shutter.

I was looking at a review of this powered telescope tripod/head in a telescope magazine which mentioned that it would be very useful for still photographers who shoot panoramas or time lapse pans. It can be programed to do a series of repos plus triggering the camera shutter.

The price seems very reasonable at around $350.

Has anyone used one of these?

I'm surprised no one replied to your post. I've had an AllView for about a year and really like! I use it primarily for solar and lunar imaging, as well as wide-field astro-imaging.

I was looking at a review of this powered telescope tripod/head in a telescope magazine which mentioned that it would be very useful for still photographers who shoot panoramas or time lapse pans. It can be programed to do a series of repos plus triggering the camera shutter.

The price seems very reasonable at around $350.

Has anyone used one of these?

I'm surprised no one replied to your post. I've had an AllView for about a year and really like! I use it primarily for solar and lunar imaging, as well as wide-field astro-imaging.

bwa

Also posted elsewhere..........

Seeing that mention of Canon being compatible, I'm trying to run my Pentax K5 on a Celestron/Sky Watcher AllView panoramic tripod. They supply a "canon cable" and yes, it plugs into my K5 and will trip the shutter. However, I discovered that the cable is defective (tested with DMM and one lead is "open") so wasn't getting autofocus. Most of the stuff out on the web sez that between canon and Pentax the wire order of shoot and autofocus is *reversed*, so I made up a cable with that crossover. The AllView now seems to be telling my K5 to autofocus, then the mount moves and THEN shoots !!!! Obviously wrong. IFFFFF the Canon wire order is really NOT reversed for the wired remote socket then my criss-cross cable may be the problem. Anbody got any input on this?

OK, wires apparently NOT reversed. With some more investigation it looks like this: the AllView issues two "relay closures", one to command the camera to autofocus and the other to trip the shutter. They both occur at the same time, and stay ON together. I found an obscure setting in my Pentax K5 that requires the autofocus to operate BEFORE the shutter can fire and that made a huge difference. I got some nice results on a 360 degree pano that ran from level to straight up, sort of a 2D "dome" effect.

So I've got it working nicely, it would seem.

If in fact my checking is correct and the shutter and autofocus commands run concurrently, then the wire order will make absolutely NO difference for those two connections. SkyWatcher didn't do a great job answering my questions on this and even worse on replacing the defective cable that came with the unit - which is to say, when I asked for them to do so they totally ignored me.

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